STRATEGIZING ACTIVITIES AND PRACTICES (SAP)

The Strategizing Activities and Practices (SAP) Interest Group invites intellectually bold and stimulating research for submission to the 84th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM 2024) taking place on 9-13 August 2024 in Chicago, IL, USA. Over the past few years, the SAP Interest Group has established an inclusive and diverse community that sheds light on practices and activities in organizations and beyond, as well as their consequentiality. The community is very both at the conference and throughout the year.

The theme of AOM 2024 is “Innovating for the Future: Policy, Purpose, and Organizations” and aims to explore “the organization of the future” in times of experienced unrest, inequality, crises, and volatility. This theme invites fresh perspectives that allow us to rethink and challenge conventional ways of organizing and managing. The theoretical underpinnings of SAP research offer particularly helpful conceptual handles to apply here, such as the various strands of practice theory, tensions and paradoxes, sociomateriality, discourse and communication, temporality, space, and power. SAP research builds on an ontology that puts day-to-day activities and practices center stage. Such research, then, affords to reveal and critique how conventional as well as emerging ways of organizing and managing – such as open organizing and open strategy, algorithmic organizing and strategizing, as well as hackathons and collectives –  are “done”, “undone”, and “redone” in practice. Indeed, power dynamics and inequality have been square and central from the early beginnings of SAP research. The thematic stance of AOM 2024 is therefore particularly close to key questions of interest to practice-based management and organization research in general and strategy-related practice research in particular.

We encourage scholars to submit conceptual work and empirical studies as well as methodological papers that focus on the specific conference theme, works that address other issues within the general domain of the SAP IG, and those that explore the intersections of the SAP IG with Divisions and Interest Groups such as STR, OMT, ODC, RM, TIM, CTO, ONE, SIM, and MOC. We also warmly invite paper and panel symposia that seek to change the conversation on established scholarly approaches and develop new questions and ways of looking at management research and impact from a practice perspective. Keeping the centrality of "Innovating for the Future" in mind, we also encourage submissions that focus on future-making, imaginaries, and utopias/dystopias as well as their role in strategy-making and other organizational processes.

Paper and symposia submissions must be made through the AOM Submission Center (opens early December 2023) by the submission deadline, Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 17:00 ET (UTC-5/GMT-5). Please carefully review all the submission information and formatting instructions, especially before submitting symposia. The scholarly program takes place from Friday, August 9 in the morning, through Tuesday, August 13 in the afternoon. Submitters are strongly encouraged to discuss potential symposia with Program Chair Matthias Wenzel.

Strong scholarship requires good reviews. Reviewing peers’ works is a fundamental process through which knowledge advances in a community. If you are submitting to the SAP Interest Group, please also consider reviewing for the IG!

For more information on Strategizing Activities and Practices, please visit the SAP Interest Group website. Financial support for the conference registration fees and travel- related expenses will be provided for a limited number of SAP member-accepted submissions if, due to constraints or circumstances, support to enable conference participation is needed.